Love Is Love

Yogi Bhajan said “love is love.” I love this quote, because unless you are willing to really give it some time and consideration, it could appear to be fairly silly self-evident circular logic. Love is Love, and pizza is pizza, and forks are forks. Yes, everything is indeed itself. It may not surprise you to know that humans are a far more complicated than pizza and forks though. And, very often, we are very much not ourselves, which causes us to search for love in all the wrong places… sometimes even in pizza.

When I first heard this deceptively simple mantra, I did not think much of it. I listened to a recording of Yogi Bhajan repeating it over and over and over and over and thought: “alright.” No golden stardust emanated from my tenth chakra. No fairies flew out of my heart. The words flew in one ear and out the other, and the CD got buried somewhere in the media cemetery of our home.

One day I was sitting at my piano and had the inspiration to write a song that began “love is the way through every block” (a play on Yogi Bhajan’s sutra “there is a way through every block”) and when I got to the chorus, the familiar words wrote themselves on my paper: love is love.

In writing, and then in singing these words, I felt I understood them in a deeper, more meaningful way.

Love is just… LOVE. It is simple. It is available. It is omnipresent. It is love.

In our modern world it seems like everyone is looking for love. Love is purported to be this thing “out there” that feels good, and you need it too. And to this end, we try to attract love by the way we look, or the way we act, or the specialness of the things we own. And even though we all know–intellectually anyway–that love is within us, our behavior suggests we have not internalized this concept at all. We really have not understood that LOVE IS LOVE.

If we did, Yogi Bhajan would not have needed to make a 31 minute track repeating this truly basic concept.

If you have ever felt the fullness and spaciousness of meditation, you have felt LOVE in a very real way. If you are ever chanted for prolonged periods of time and felt elated, you have felt LOVE in a very real way. If you have ever felt gratitude, peacefulness, relaxed–you have felt LOVE in a very real way.

That is because love is just there. It is what we experience, naturally, when you are not doing something, or thinking something, that creates a barrier to it. It is what you experience as normal when you are a child, because you have not yet learned how to barricade yourself from the love that is always there.

Yes, love is indeed love. And pizza is also pizza. But I think pizza is very well understood. Few of you are trying to order pizza from a couch, or trying to make it out toothpicks. Our educational system, and our media, have successfully taught gotten the point across that you can order pizza from a restaurant, and you which ingredients you need for making it at home. There is very little confusion about this.

And yet love has not been taught very well.

Love is that thing that Ross and Rachel go in and out of on Friends. Love is that thing that is given and then taken away when someone loses interest in you. Love is the that thing you would feel if that person would only respond to your voicemails.

If you believe love exists in a relationship with another person, you have not understood that love is love. Because love is being love through it all. Just here. And here. And here. And here. You get the point, right?

Our relationship to love is indicative of our relationship with our soul. The more love we feel, the stronger our relationship. And the stronger our relationship, the more love we feel. You cannot help but feel love when you are feeling like YOU. And you are only YOU when you are in relationship with your infinite Self. That is why we “do” yoga, is it not?

I invite you to sit in the love that is you. Allow love to be itself, which means you allow you to be You, which means you allow you to be love.

In summary: love is love.

Lyrics
LOVE IS
Love is the way through every block / Love is the key to every lock
Love is in each and every heart / Love is the glue that holds each part
Where we listen or choose to ignore/Love will keep knocking even at a stubborn door
Love is love is love is love

Love is each mile on route to the top / It never gets tired. It doesn’t stop
Love is the spark in all that grows / Where there is doubt, love knows
Whether we see it or it’s out of our sight / If we receive it, it makes everything right
Love is love is love is love
Love is beyond our control / It wakes in the bed of our soul
It is the known unknown / Guiding us all on our journey home
Whether you say it in so many words/ Here is it again in the simplest terms
Love is love is love is love